In Death 29 - Kindred in Death

around her to tuck her close. “You’ll find more.”
    “Maybe it was a vic.” Her voice slurred. “And he figures MacMasters didn’t do enough . . . blame the cop, punish the cop. Maybe . . .”
    In the dark, Roarke stroked her back as she went under, as Galahad plopped on the bed at her feet. And he thought, Here we are, all safe and sound for the night.
     
    She dreamed of dark rooms, and of tracks dug into the hard streets of her city. Following them as things scrabbled away in the shadows. She dreamed of the young girl watching her with dead eyes.
    As she tracked, an animated billboard sprang to life, stories high and filled with the image of the girl weeping, defenseless, bleeding. Her voice filled the dark with pain, with fear.
    He was there with her—she felt him behind her, beside her, in front of her. Breathing, waiting, watching while the girl begged and bled and died.
    He was there while the image changed to another girl, a girl in a room smeared with red light. There, while the girl Eve had been begged and bled and killed.
    So she ripped herself out of the dream with her heart stuttering and the air trapped in her lungs. She forced the air out. “Lights. Lights on, ten percent.”
    Her hands shook lightly as she stared at them, turned them over, looking for the blood.
    Not there, of course it’s not there. Just a dream, and not so bad. Not so bad. Closing her eyes she willed her heartbeat to slow, to steady. But she couldn’t will away the cold, and Roarke wasn’t there to warm her.
    Her teeth wanted to chatter, so she gritted them as she got up, found a robe. She checked the time, saw it was just shy of five-thirty. Going to the house monitor, she cleared her throat.
    “Where is Roarke?”
    Good morning, darling Eve. Roarke is in his main office.
    “What the hell for?” she wondered, and went off to find out.
    Stupid, she told herself, just stupid to be too uneasy to go back to bed, catch the half hour she had left. But she couldn’t face it, not alone.
    She heard him as she neared the office, but the words were strange, jumbled, foreign. She thought longingly of coffee, and thought she needed the zap of it to clear her brain because she’d have sworn Roarke was speaking in Chinese.
    She walked, bleary-eyed, to his open office door. Maybe she was still dreaming, she thought, because Roarke damn well was speaking Chinese. Or possibly Korean.
    On the wall screen an Asian held his end of the conversation in perfect English. Roarke stood, circling a holo-model of some sort of building. Every so often the structure changed, or opened into an interior view, as if he or the other man made some small adjustment.
    Expanses of glass increased, openings that had been angled, arched.
    Fascinated, she leaned on the doorjamb and watched him work.
    He’d dressed for the day but hadn’t bothered, as yet, with a suit jacket or tie. That told her the man on screen was an employee rather than a business partner.
    He studied the holo, shifted to pick up a mug of coffee from his desk. As he drank he listened to the other man talk of space and flow, ambient light.
    Roarke interrupted with another spate of Chinese, indicated what looked to Eve to be the southeast corner of the building.
    Moments later what had been solid became glass. The roof on that sector lifted, changed angles, then relaxed into a kind of soft curve.
    And Roarke nodded.
    She pushed off the jamb when the conversation ended. The screen went blank, and the holo poofed.
    “Since when have you been fluent in Chinese? Or whatever that was.”
    He turned toward her, surprise flickering over his face. “What are you doing up? You’ve barely had three hours down.”
    “Pot, kettle. Was that Chinese?”
    “It was. Mandarin. And I don’t speak above a handful of basic words. Comp translator, two-way.”
    Her brow knit even as he crossed to the AutoChef. “I’ve never seen—heard—a translator that clear. It sounded like you, not comp-generated.”
    “Something we’ve been working on for a while, and are selling in a few key markets.” He handed her the coffee he’d programmed for her. “It makes it easy to do business when it feels and sounds like a conversation rather than a translation.”
    “What was the thing? The holo?”
    “A complex we’re building outside of Beijing.” His eyes darkened as he studied her face. “You had a nightmare.”
    “Sort of. It wasn’t bad. It’s okay.”
    But she didn’t protest when he drew